3 Practical suggestions for improving Cyrodiil

BejaProphet

Suggestions followed by reasoning.

1. Implement an hourly reward system based on the hourly point tics.

One of the problems in cyrodiil is the lack of incentive to play the map. AP can be better achieved in other ways. The end of campaign rewards is too far and few and too small to truly motivate people to play the map. Everyone who plays the map does it for love of the game, probably knowing that they could earn greater rewards doing other things. Make it so that each score update two things are rewarded. First, reward having the most points of the three alliances. Second, reward an alliance who has improved their hourly tic score by a certain impressive amount of points. This will cause players to want to gain and hold territory rather than AP farming and flipping keeps back and forth.

2. Make the campaigns end with a bang, not a whimper. (MY BIGGEST SUGGESTION!!)

Do SOMETHING to make the end of a campaign exciting. Right now, end of campaigns are meaningless. At a certain point a comeback becomes impossible, so everybody is killing time waiting for the next campaign knowing that each keep capture or defense is meaningless beyond personal AP. Make something happen in the end that is crucial. It could be as simple has a small window of all score objectives are worth 10 times the amount for the last 5% of the campaign duration, or it could be something as spectacular as special map objectives with huge payoffs. Let the team going into the event with the lead have the advantage, but make a window at the end of the campaign to where the war climaxes with a bang and huge reversals are possible, rather than whimper out into boredom. Make me plan my schedule around the exciting campaign event because its that awesome!

3. Restrict people to one siege weapon.

Saved this controversial one for last. But part of the problem in Cyrodiil (depending on your view) is how fast a SMALL well organized team can take a keep. I could swear I've seen them take down a keep door in 2 minutes, but time perception might be skewed in battle. I am all for a good organized team winning. Organization and skill ought to carry the day. The problem is not that it can carry the day, but in how fast it can sweep a map. Right now, a team that really knows what it is doing, can have five people manning ballistas and simultaneously basically fully manning a battering ram. Throw in an outer ring of five people double or triple manning catapults/ballistaes, and you can have a ten man team possibly maxing a siege weapon cap on a door that is already too easily caved in. A perfectly organized team can do this so fast that you can turn away for mere moments and the castle is popped. You can go do a farm defense and find that two castles and an outpost behind you has flipped. Once again, problem is not that a good team can do it, but in how fast. The end result is that staying in a castle to defend it (assuming its not your last emperor keep) is strategically foolish. You can do too much running from keep to keep. We have guild log on, sweep the map in an hour, and log off, because its not worth it to hold ground when another group is not set up to do the sweeping. You could fix this by buffing keep health, but then you make it too tedious for unorganized groups to try and take a keep. Best solution, one siege weapon manning at a time. Simply make the siege weapons not reload on their own perhaps.

End result of these three things will be people actually playing to take and hold territory, not merely to capture and move on. Cheers.

WaltherCarraway

My suggestion to make Cyrodiil better is to provide a comprehensive tutorial to new players. So they can know what they are doing and what they should do instead of being ganked from nowhere, respawn and rage quit.

TelvanniWizard

Fix that lag.

Drummerx04

TelvanniWizard wrote: »

Fix that lag.

This first and foremost has to take priority. If I can't approach a defended keep without disconnecting, or if skills take 2-3 seconds to go off... then pvp isn't particularly fun for that time frame.

Gothren

1. fix dc to login screen
2. fix lag
3. fix weapon bar locks
4. fix crappy servers

NBrookus

I would strongly disagree with #3. The last thing we need is more incentive to stack larger groups in one place. It's already painfully easy for a full raid to take a keep in less than a few minutes. If there's a big group attacking and only a small group defending while waiting for (you hope) reinforcements, the defenders will be at an even stronger disadvantage because they can't run multiple oils or other counter siege. End result? Easier than ever for a full raid to pvdoor a keep before anyone can respond.

But really... yeah lag is the #1 reason I log off early. Want to keep me online? Don't make it painful to watch my character dies while I can't weapon swap or have my skills go off.

Rohamad_Ali

I like suggestion 1 . Suggestion 2 needs more thought and suggestion 3 just encourages zerging .

Maikon

WaltherCarraway wrote: »

My suggestion to make Cyrodiil better is to provide a comprehensive tutorial to new players. So they can know what they are doing and what they should do instead of being ganked from nowhere, respawn and rage quit.

You can't teach people to pvp, it comes from experience.

BejaProphet

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

I like suggestion 1 . Suggestion 2 needs more thought and suggestion 3 just encourages zerging .

I have no idea the best way to implement suggestion two. But I'm confident that what I'm asking for as a general idea would be fantastic for the game. I think everybody would enjoy having the campaigns come to some sort of climax instead of a point where it just becomes pointless so we wait for the next campaign to start. It would bring nothing but excitement. The loosing teams would be able to keep fighting knowing there is a chance we could pull things out in the end even if we go in with a disadvantage, while the teams ahead would be looking forward saying, "we have to get ready, they are going to come at us hard in a last ditch effort for victory." Excitement would build for every faction. Heck, our entertainment has deliberately cultivated us to look for a climax in struggles, where everything that came before has led to this one moment of do or die. Consequently it is just plain unpalatable that our campaigns (for all practical purposes) end early in a quiet acceptance of defeat as it slowly becomes mathematically impossible for a comeback.

Derra

Fix lag.

Give real incentives for people to go there. Doing that over hourly point evaluations is actually a neat idea.

Give out special currency as campaign rewards that allows to buy specific mount(s), housing items, vanity items (costume/jewelry whatevs).

Docmandu

Remove scoring, remove campaign cycles, remove campaign rewards.

And fix constant Loading screens...

then again.. fixed those by not playing anymore.

davey1107

I can get behind all of them.

1. Hourly AP: I think that's a good idea, and there's lots of potential here. You could reward totally territory controlled or new territory gained in the last scoring session. Kind of any change might help alleviate the practice of just going to undefended back keeps over and over.

2. End of campaigns: this is one of the weirdest things in ESO to me. A campaign ends and...nothing. Not even a notification. They could definitely work on this.

3. Siege: yes, with four people who know what they're doing you can take a keep in about 2 minutes. (Oddly the game has evolved to a front door method on inners, which is slower and more dangerous IMO, but whatever). It's nice that you can small group these because it theoretically reduces zergs...but then this strategy isn't used to encourage small scale combat, it's used so that lazy players can disrupt the map by running into an undefended keep so quick that the opposing team doesn't have time to respond. The practice exposes some flaws in the system:

- siege are too invulnerable. It's kind of stupid how hard they are to destroy with another siege. At the very least, I'd like to see a shorter range ballista that can burn them faster...forcing attackers to use trebuchet if they want to small group siege.

- there's no real incentive to defend. I like fighting off siegers and I'm really, really good at it. I can really annoy and delay up to ten man groups. However, there's not a huge incentive for defending keeps any more...the ap stinks. A lot of times I'll ignore drake or brindle because it's more rewarding to let it flip to a 4-10 person assault, wait five minutes then take it back.

- keeps are too vulnerable. The walls come down too fast, and with the power creep the NPCs are too weak (they used to be impossible to plow through quickly). I'm not sure what the solution is. They shouldn't take so long that zergs always come and kill small groups, but they shouldn't be flipping fives an hour either.

biminirwb17_ESO

If idea #1 is to work well a faction lock for the hour after needs to be implemented. If it isn't what is to stop a group changing factions each hour to "farm" the reward? A good idea otherwise.

I would suggest making keep doors the same "strength" as walls. PVDoor has flourished since the RAM damage was increased.

Neoauspex

I agree with @davey1107 there should be some sort of defensive siege that damages siege weapons significantly but players minimally.

DeadlyRecluse

suggestion #1 would need significant nuance to prevent the optimal strategy from being to AFK in a buff server.

BejaProphet

DeadlyRecluse wrote: »

suggestion #1 would need significant nuance to prevent the optimal strategy from being to AFK in a buff server.

As I thought about my first suggestion more, I think it would really suffer from encouraging players towards a buff server. Its hard enough to get people away from that as is, guaranteeing less rewards for going to a more challenging campaign would probably kill this idea without getting very clever with it.

SugaComa

Personally I think campaigns should be split into 4 hour and 12 hour campaigns with faction lock and have the campaign reset after the allotted time.

Morgul667

Point 1 looks nice but would encourage farming and one faction controlling one campaign for AP farm so its a no for me.

I actually disagree with other 2 points Seriously dont think it would make cyrodill better. I dont like zergs but I like mechanics that encourage small group of players.

CaliMade

dissconnect the outposts from the emperor keep circle, move them outward a good deal, allow spawning there only from the home keeps.

Increase the amount of Ap gained for capturing Brindle draklowe and D Claw along with towns. Decrease the amount of AP gained from Emporer Keeps.


this one is kinda iffy but, decrease overall AP gains by 30%, make each town captured grant the respective faction a 10% Ap increase.


Make Significant adjustments to AP split between groups for killing players and taking Keeps. if player is worth 2k fresh then a maximum group size of 5 can see 100% that split evenly between players, a group of 6-10 should get 75% ( 1.5k split even) , and 11 or more players should only see 50% of that characters total worth.

same for keeps, if a keep is worth 6.5k then if it is capped by only 10 players, they each should get 6.5k Ap, groups of 11-24 will only see 75% of that. And the massive. Zergs that roll 25+ should only receive 50%.


Make resources more meaningful in capturing keeps.

if a Keep door has 300k HP then it should be 1.2 mill with the Lumbermill Under Control. basically make taking resources more of a requirement than an option.

they may not be the best options, but its always good to brainstorm.

NightbladeMechanics

1. No need to overcomplicate things. Just rework rewards for the worthy to make them meaningful.

2. Campaigns with full populations are usually pretty close, and a close ending gets people excited. I'd rather see randomized objective events spawn throughout the campaign or some objectives created to tie Cyrodiil to PvE zones to keep people interested, and better measures implemented to keep populations competitive. A good place to start is closing campaigns.

3. Just a bad idea.

BejaProphet

NightbladeMechanics wrote: »

1. No need to overcomplicate things. Just rework rewards for the worthy to make them meaningful.

2. Campaigns with full populations are usually pretty close, and a close ending gets people excited. I'd rather see randomized objective events spawn throughout the campaign or some objectives created to tie Cyrodiil to PvE zones to keep people interested, and better measures implemented to keep populations competitive. A good place to start is closing campaigns.

3. Just a bad idea.

I appreciate your views.

1. That's fine, I'm just suggesting that something be implemented to short term and frequently reward a focus on territory, rather than AP gain. The problem with just relying on the current rewards for the worthy system, is that territory control is irrelevant. If they rework that, wonderful so long as it is reworked to reward and motivate playing the map.

2. Maybe we have different experiences. I don't think close campaigns usually happen. They happen, but they aren't the normal. Something like I am suggesting would make the "normal" experience more exciting. At least in 30 day campaigns there is usually a dead week at the end. Or at least several days. Also, I'm focusing on easily implemented suggestions (or trying). That's what I meant by practical. For example they could easily apply a X5 modifier to the last three days of a thirty day campaign. It wouldn't take the massive development that your counter suggestion would take. But I'd love to see your suggestion as well.

3. My suggestion for how to solve it, perhaps it stinks, I don't know. But making it such that it takes longer than 2 minutes for an organized group to take a keep. That would be a good thing. Its not fun for a fully buffed castle to be at 100%, you go out to protect a farm, turn around and they are already in the keep, and by the time you get inside the inner keep the inner door is at 5-15%. Its not healthy for players to be able to routinely skip the entire siege defense. How that is resolved doesn't matter as much as that it is addressed.

Joy_Division

With regards to siege.

The amount of time needed for an organized group to take a keep is one of the few things ZoS has gotten right. I play in an organized guild and often times our attempts to take a backline undefended keep are often frustrated by enemy players who begin to arrive while we are still trying to flip flags. An immediate and decisive response to a flagged keep will get there in time provided rapid maneuvers are constantly up and people don't waste time dealing with gankers.

If more time is desirable, that should be a function of a keep upgraded that have stronger walls (more than they do now) and include more guards with more dangerous abilities (seriously, the guards are irrelevant). No need to place artificial mechanics in the game, just make use of the existing ones that provide incentives to properly secure back-line keeps.

BejaProphet

Joy_Division wrote: »

With regards to siege.

The amount of time needed for an organized group to take a keep is one of the few things ZoS has gotten right. I play in an organized guild and often times our attempts to take a backline undefended keep are often frustrated by enemy players who begin to arrive while we are still trying to flip flags. An immediate and decisive response to a flagged keep will get there in time provided rapid maneuvers are constantly up and people don't waste time dealing with gankers.

If more time is desirable, that should be a function of a keep upgraded that have stronger walls (more than they do now) and include more guards with more dangerous abilities (seriously, the guards are irrelevant). No need to place artificial mechanics in the game, just make use of the existing ones that provide incentives to properly secure back-line keeps.

I disagree. On another thread a player admitted that the last time they timed their guild, from the moment the castle was flagged as under attack, to the moment they took both flags was 100 seconds. He said this was with a fully buffed castle. He said this as a response to my personally bewilderment that I had actually timed an enemy take down our keep from the first impact to captured flags to be 2 min and 30 seconds. So I well believe him. 100 seconds, that is not enough time for players to come to the keeps defense with rapid maneuver from a nearby castle, and I would argue its not even enough time for players inside to set up a proper response. That's too fast. I'm all for such skilled guilds being able to consistently beat a keep defense. What I object to is how they are able to skip the defense entirely.